One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."

Ukrainian army general with other officers defects to the Donetsk People’s Republic

This information will probably not be relayed by the official media
because “they demonstrate that Ukraine of Poroshenko is torn from
within."

Former Assistant Minister of Defence of Ukraine, “Major-General”
(equivalent to a general of army corps in France) Aleksandr Kolomiyets,
passed with arms and baggage to the side of the Novorussian resistance.
Arms and baggage, or more accurately with other officers of the
Ukrainian National Army.

“I am Alexander Kolomiyets, a major-general of the Ukrainian armed
forces … My last position was adviser to the Ukrainian defense minister
and senior defense analyst,” he said at the opening of the conference
that he gave to Donetsk. He added: “I will work for the good of the
People’s Republic of Donetsk. “. “Observe who is currently fighting;
only voluntary National Guard." “Soon, there will be unrest in the
army. They do not understand the orders given to them, to kill
civilians. We will see that by fall, everything will change. ”

Together General of the Army corps and officers around him came
provide assistance to the armed forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
The general is a leading rookie for the rebellion of Donbass, not only
because he is a very senior officer knows the Kievan enemy within, but
he also knows very well the military of the Donetsk region for having
spent 19 years at the helm. This is also a very damaging loss for the
Kiev junta.

Constant purges within the ranks of Ukrainian armies and security
services, popular demonstrations against the US omnipresence, all this
is beginning to weigh heavily on real Ukrainians who care about their
country and their families.

The general and his friends do not go to the Novorusse side on a
whim. Beforehand, they took care to put their families safe from Kievan
reprisals. According to him, many of his fellow commanders seek to go
over to the separatists, they would be about a hundred:

“The morale of the Ukrainian army is at its lowest, officers and
generals are aware of the criminal nature of political power in place in
Kiev and do not want to fight.”

Before him, the former head of customs at Lugansk, Oleg Tchermoussov,
had also left his post to join the separatists. Lately Alexei and Yuri
Miroshnichenko brothers attached to the Ukrainian Embassy in Paris
(attached to the Foreign Intelligence of Ukraine), had joined the
separatists because of their disagreement with the Kiev policy. And
these are two more recruits of choice, from the heart of the enemy
system, to strengthen the cause of the New Russia.

The two brothers decided to leave work in Paris and return home in
Lugansk. They claim to be in total disagreement with the policies of the
regime in Kiev. They joined with their own means Lugansk where they
gave a press conference to explain the reasons for their actions:

“My brother and I have seen what was going on in Ukraine, the coming
to power of some people. We decided to leave and who have nowhere to go
we decided to come back home in Lugansk […] We have not been forced by
anyone, we have made this decision voluntarily. We could reasonably
continue to work for the regime that is in place in Ukraine. These are
just traitors, fascists and agents in the pay of other nations, they
lead the country to ruin. “.

We must be courageous in this climate of purges and reprisals in Kiev
to protest against the Americans who invested the government with three
key ministers:https://youtu.be/Y05zqTfYo4k

This was done a few days ago the Ukrainians in Kiev. We hear very clearly protesters shout: “US go home! ”

This does not prevent the US-oligarch Kiev regime massaging equipment
and men on the front line of contact as shown by the map below, which
takes stock of the positioning of troops this morning June 24, 2015. The
troops of Kiev are in blue:

However soldiers are certainly not thrilled to have to face their former compatriots. They have in mind the aisles of graves of fighters that extend and multiply in cemeteries.

In recent hours, the front line has remained stable but the shelling continued on Donetsk, Gorlovka, Marinka and Shirokino particular. The intensity of the fighting northwest of Lugansk also increases.

The war in Ukraine is not yet complete, the system set up by the Americans is likely to collapse. That’s probably what they see coming as they do get wet too. The promised military equipment is still waiting, and Canadian trainers. But no doubt that the US authorities do not care about destroying a country, as long as they have wreaked havoc by dividing a little more of Europe, an amount of Europeans of Russia against Europeans of the Union. And we have not seen everything yet, they will not stop in such a bad way, because they are destabilizing the Balkans.

Whether True Or A Parody The Night Watchman Has A Valid Story
And An Entertaining One

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert.
Congress said, “Someone may steal from it at night.”
So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.
Then Congress said, “How does the watchman do his job without instruction?”
So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person
to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.
Then Congress said, “How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?”
So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One was to do the studies and one was to write the reports.
Then Congress said, “How are these people going to get paid?”
So they created two positions: a time keeper and a payroll officer then hired two people.
Then Congress said, “Who will be accountable for all of these people?”
So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an
Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal
Secretary.
Then Congress said, “We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $918,000 over budget, we must cut back.”
So they laid-off the night watchman.

NOW slowly, let it sink in.
Quietly, we go like sheep to slaughter. Does anybody remember the
reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during
the Carter administration?
Anybody?

No?
Didn’t think so!
Bottom line is, we’ve spent several hundred billion dollars in support
of an agency, the reason for which very few people who read this can
remember!
Ready?
It was very simple… and at the time, everybody thought it very appropriate.

The Department of Energy was instituted on 8/04/1977, TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.

AND NOW IT’S 2015 — 38 YEARS LATER — AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS
“NECESSARY” DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. IT HAS 16,000
FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES; AND LOOK
AT THE JOB IT HAS DONE!

Greece: Sound and Fury Signifying Much

Paul Craig Roberts

All of Europe, and insouciant Americans and Canadians as well, are
put on notice by Syriza’s surrender to the agents of the One Percent.
The message from the collapse of Syriza is that the social welfare
system throughout the West will be dismantled.

The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has agreed to the One
Percent’s looting of the Greek people of the advances in social welfare
that the Greeks achieved in the post-World War II 20th century. Pensions
and health care for the elderly are on the way out. The One Percent
needs the money.

The protected Greek islands, ports, water companies, airports, the
entire panoply of national patrimony, is to be sold to the One Percent.
At bargain prices, of course, but the subsequent water bills will not
be bargains.

This is the third round of austerity imposed on Greece, austerity
that has required the complicity of the Greeks’ own governments. The
austerity agreements serve as a cover for the looting of the Greek
people literally of everything. is one member of the Troika
that is imposing the austerity, despite the fact that the IMF’s
economists have said that the austerity measures have proven to be a
mistake. The Greek economy has been driven down by the austerity.
Therefore, Greece’s indebtedness has increased as a burden. Each round
of austerity makes the debt less payable.

But when the One Percent is looting, facts are of no interest. The
austerity, that is the looting, has gone forward despite the fact that
the IMF’s economists cannot justify it.

Greek democracy has proven itself to be impotent. The looting is
going forward despite the vote one week ago by the Greek people
rejecting it. So what we observe in Alexis Tsipras is an elected prime
minister representing not the Greek people but the One Percent.

The One Percent’s sigh of relief has been heard around the world.
The last European leftist party, or what passes as leftist, has been
brought to heel, just like Britain’s Labour Party, the French Socialist
Party, and all the rest.

Without an ideology to sustain it, the European left is dead, just as
is the Democratic Party in the US. With the death of these political
parties, the people no longer have any voice. A government in which the
people have no voice is not a democracy. We can see this clearly in
Greece. One week after the Greek people express themselves decisively
in a referendum, their government ignores them and accommodates the One
Percent.

The American Democratic Party died with jobs offshoring, which
destroyed the party’s financial base in the manufacturing unions. The
European left died with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was a symbol that there existed a socialist
alternative to capitalism. The Soviet collapse and “the end of history”
deprived the left of an economic program and left the left-wing, at
least in America, with “social issues” such as abortion, homosexual
marriage, gender equality, and racism, which undermined the left-wing’s
traditional support with the working class. Class warfare disappeared
in the warfare between heterosexuals and homosexuals, blacks and whites,
men and women.

Today with the Western peoples facing re-enserfment and with the
world facing nuclear war as a result of the American neoconservatives’
claim to be History’s chosen people entitled to world hegemony, the
American left is busy hating the Confederate battle flag.

The collapse of Europe’s last left-wing party, Syrzia, means that
unless more determined parties arise in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, the
baton passes to the right-wing parties—-to Nigel Farage’s UK
Independence Party, to Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, and to
other right-wing parties who stand for nationalism against national
extermination in EU membership.

Syriza could not succeed once it failed to nationalize the Greek
banks in response to the EU’s determination to make them fail. The
Greek One Percent have the banks and the media, and the Greek military
shows no sign of standing with the people. What we see here is the
impossibility of peaceful change, as Karl Marx and Lenin explained.

Revolutions and fundamental reforms are frustrated or overturned by
the One Percent who are left alive. Marx, frustrated by the defeat of
the Revolutions of 1848 and instructed by his materialist conception of
history, concluded, as did Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, that leaving the
members of the old order alive meant counter-revolution and the return
of the people to serfdom. In Latin America every reformist government is
vulnerable to overthrow by US economic interests acting in conjunction
with the Spanish elites. We see this process underway today in
Venezuela and Ecuador.

Duly instructed, Lenin and Mao eliminated the old order. The class
holocaust was many times greater than anything the Jews experienced in
the Nazi racial holocaust. But there is no memorial to it.

To this day Westerners do not understand why Pol Pot emptied
Cambodia’s urban areas. The West dismisses Pol Pot as a psychopath and
mass murderer, a psychiatric case, but Pol Pot was simply acting on the
supposition that if he permitted representatives of the old order to
remain his revolution would be overthrown. To use a legal concept
enshrined by the George W. Bush regime, Pol Pot pre-empted
counter-revolution by striking in advance of the act and eliminating the
class inclined to counter-revolution.

The English conservative Edmund Burke said that the path of progress
was reform, not revolution. The English elite, although they dragged
their heels, accepted reform in place of revolution, thus vindicating
Burke. But today with the left so totally defeated, the One Percent
does not have to agree to reforms. Compliance with their power is the
only alternative.

Greece is only the beginning. Greeks driven out of their country by
the collapsed economy, demise of the social welfare system, and
extraordinary rate of unemployment will take their poverty to other EU
countries. Members of the EU are not bound by national boundaries and
can freely emigrate. Closing down the support system in Greece will
drive Greeks into the support systems of other EU countries, which will
be closed down in turn by the One Percent’s privatizations.

Pentagon Concludes America Not Safe Unless It Conquers The World

Paul Craig Roberts

The Pentagon has released its “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015,” June 2015. http://news.usni.org/2015/07/02/document-2015-u-s-national-military-strategy
The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state
actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to
understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge
international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies
independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are
threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon
admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are
independent. In other words, the norm is dependence on Washington.

Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign
states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.”
In other words, their independence is out of step with the
neoconservative Uni-power doctrine that declares independence to be the
right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes
any other country being independent in its actions.

The Pentagon’s report defines the foremost “revisionist states” as
Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The focus is primarily on
Russia. Washington hopes to co-op China, despite the “tension to the
Asia-Pacific region” that China’s defense of its sphere of influence, a
defense “inconsistent with international law” (this from Washington, the
great violator of international law), by turning over what remains of
the American consumer market to China. It is not yet certain that Iran
has escaped the fate that Washington imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine, and by complicity
Palestine.

The Pentagon report is sufficiently audacious in its hypocrisy, as
all statements from Washington are, to declare that Washington and its
vassals “support the established institutions and processes dedicated to
preventing conflict, respecting sovereignty, and furthering human
rights.” This from the military of a government that has invaded,
bombed, and overthrown 11 governments since the Clinton regime and is
currently working to overthrow governments in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan,
Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.

In the Pentagon document, Russia is under fire for not acting “in
accordance with international norms,” which means Russia is not
following Washington’s leadership.

In other words, this is a bullshit report written by neocons in order to foment war with Russia.

Nothing else can be said about the Pentagon report, which justifies
war and more war. Without war and conquests, Americans are not safe.

Washington’s view toward Russia is the same as Cato the Elder’s view
toward Carthage. Cato the Elder finished his every speech on any subject
in the Roman Senate with the statement “Carthage must be destroyed.”

This report tells us that war with Russia is our future unless Russia
agrees to become a vassal state like every country in Europe, and
Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Japan. Otherwise, the neoconservatives
have decided that it is impossible for Americans to tolerate living with
a country that makes decisions independently of Washington. If
American cannot be The Uni-Power dictating to the world, better that we
are all dead. At least that will show the Russians.

Banks create money when they make loans. Greece could
restore the liquidity desperately needed by its banks and its economy by
nationalizing the banks and issuing digital loans backed by government
guarantees to its ailing businesses. Greece could provide an inspiring
model of sustainable prosperity for the world. But it is being strangled
by a hegemonic power in a financial war that is being waged against us
all.

On July 4, 2015, one day before the national vote on the austerity demands of Greece’s creditors, it was rumored in the Financial Times
that Greek banks were preparing to “bail in” (or confiscate) depositor
funds to replace the liquidity choked off by the European Central Bank.

The response of the Syriza government, to its credit, was “no way.” As reported in Zerohedge, the government was prepared to pursue three “nuclear options” to protect the deposits of the Greek people:

nationalize the banks,

launch a parallel currency in the form of electronic California-style IOUs, and

Syriza sources say the Greek ministry of finance is
examining options to take direct control of the banking system if need
be rather than accept a draconian seizure of depositor savings –
reportedly a ‘bail-in’ above a threshhold of €8,000 – and to prevent any
banks being shut down on the orders of the ECB.Government officials recognize that this would lead to an
unprecedented rift with the EU authorities. But Syriza’s attitude at
this stage is that their only defense against a hegemonic power is to
fight guerrilla warfare.

The Hegemonic Power of the ECB

The Greek crisis is a banking crisis, and it was precipitated largely
by the Mafia-like tactics of the European Central Bank and the
international banks it serves (notably Goldman Sachs). As Jeffrey Sachs observed in the Financial Times in 2012:

The Greek economy is collapsing not mainly from fiscal
austerity or the lack of external competitiveness but from the chronic
lack of working capital. Greece’s small and medium-sized enterprises can
no longer obtain funding. . . . The shutdown of Greece’s banking sector
brings to mind the dramatic shrinkage of bank lending during 1929-33 in
the Great Depression.

A central bank is supposed to protect the financial
stability of solvent banks. But from early February, the ECB cut off
direct financing of Greek banks, instead drip-feeding them expensive
liquidity on special “emergency” terms. This promoted a slow run on the
banks and paralyzed economic activity. When the negotiations broke down,
the ECB capped the assistance, prompting a fast bank run and giving
them an excuse to impose capital controls and effectively shut them
down.

In December 2014, when the Greek Parliament was threatening to reject the pro-austerity presidential candidate, Goldman Sachs warned in a memo:

In the event of a severe Greek government clash with
international lenders, interruption of liquidity provision to Greek
banks by the ECB could potentially even lead to a Cyprus-style prolonged
“bank holiday”.

And that is exactly what happened after the anti-austerity Syriza
Party was elected in January. Why would the ECB have to “interrupt
liquidity provision” just because of a “clash with international
lenders”? As noted by Mark Weisbrot, the move was completely unnecessary.

Events are now spinning out of control. The banks remain
shut. The ECB has maintained its liquidity freeze, and through its
inaction is asphyxiating the banking system.

Factories are shutting down across the country as stocks of raw
materials run out and containers full of vitally-needed imports clog up
Greek ports. Companies cannot pay their suppliers because external
transfers are blocked. Private scrip currencies are starting to appear
as firms retreat to semi-barter outside the banking system.

The Tourniquet of the Central Bank

It is not just Greek banks but all banks that are dependent on
central bank liquidity, because they are all technically insolvent. They
all lend money they don’t have. As the Bank of England recently acknowledged,
banks do not actually lend their deposits. Rather, they create deposits
when they make loans. They do this simply with accounting entries.
There is no real limit to how much money they can create, so long as
they can find creditworthy customers willing to borrow it.

The catch is that the bank still has to balance its books at the end
of the day. If it comes up short, it can borrow from the banks into
which its deposits (whether “real” or newly created) have migrated.
Banks can borrow from each other at very low rates (in the US, the Fed
funds rate is 0.25%). They keep the difference in rates as their profit.

The central bank, which has the power to print money, is the ultimate
backstop in this money-creating scheme. If there is leakage in the
system from cash withdrawals or transfers to foreign banks, the central
bank supplies the liquidity, again at very low bankers’ rates.

That is the way the system should work. But in the Eurozone, the
national central banks of member countries have relinquished their
critical credit power to the European Central Bank. And the ECB, like
the US Federal Reserve, marches to the drums of large international
banks. The central bank can flick the credit switch on or off at its
whim. Any country that resists going along with the creditors’ austerity
program may find that its banks have been cut off from this critical
liquidity, being branded no longer “good credit risks.” That damning
judgment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as is now happening in
Greece.

Turning the Credit Spigots Back On

The problem now for Greece is how to restore bank liquidity without
the help of the ECB. One way would be to leave the Eurozone and return
to its own national currency, as many pundits have urged. Its central
bank could then issue all the drachmas needed to fund the government and
provide cash for the banks.

But that alternative comes with other major downsides, including that the drachma would probably plummet against the euro. Greek leaders have therefore sought to stay in the Eurozone, but that means dealing with the bank runs that are bleeding the banks of euros. It also means bowing to ECB regulation, something the ECB is attempting to impose on all Eurozone banks.

Assuming, however, that Greece stays in the EU, might there be a way
that the government could restore the liquidity necessary to keep its
banks and the economy afloat, without the help of the ECB and while
continuing to use the euro?

Consider again the Bank of England’s bombshell 2014 report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.”
According to the BOE, 97% of the money supply is now created by banks
when they make loans. British banks create digital pounds. US banks
create digital dollars. And Greek banks create digital euros.

How it all works is explained by Kumhof and Jakab in an IMF paper called “Banks Are Not Intermediaries of Loanable Funds — And Why This Matters.”
They note that the chief practical limit to the digital creation of
money is simply the willingness of banks to make loans. The central bank
can create massive “excess reserves” (as the Fed did with “quantitative
easing”), but bank lending to local businesses will not increase if the
banks do not see a profit in it. The problem is called “pushing on a
string”: there is no mechanism for forcing banks to make loans.

That is true in a private commercial system, but in a nationalized
system, the government can “pull” on the string. It can manage the
lending of its state-owned banks, as China and Japan have done for
decades. Loans to local businesses can be guaranteed with government
letters of credit in lieu of capital; and if some loans turn out to be
“non-performing,” they can be written off or just carried on the books,
as China has also done for decades. The money was created as accounting
entries and can be carried on the books as accounting entries.

The Greek government could follow China’s lead and nationalize its
private banks, all of which are insolvent. It could then use their
digital money machines to pump liquidity back into the economy, by
making loans to all those once-viable businesses now starved of funds.
Restoring their credit lines would allow them to pay for workers and
materials, generating purchasing power and sales, increasing employment
and the tax base, and generally reversing the economic death spiral
induced by insufficient money in the system to keep the wheels of
production turning.

In an All-digital System, the Books Are Always Balanced.

Balancing the books can easily be achieved in a closed, nationalized,
digital banking system, so long as liquidity can be kept from leaking
out in the form of physical cash withdrawals or transfers to foreign
banks. Money transferred digitally within the system can always be found
somewhere and borrowed back by the bank from which it was transferred,
balancing its books.

The remaining question is, how to deal with leakage in the form of
cash withdrawals or transfers to foreign banks? One radical possibility
would be to go all digital: cash would no longer be official legal
tender after some designated date. President Roosevelt did something
similar when he took the dollar off the gold standard and ordered people
to cash in their gold for paper dollars in 1933.

That approach, however, is highly controversial. Ideally, it could be
avoided by simply paying an attractive digital bonus for depositing
physical cash in the banks, and paying an attractive interest rate to
keep it there. A sizable fee could also be charged for cash withdrawals
or transfers outside Greek banks. This would not actually be a
“haircut,” since the digital euros would be available for use at full
value so long as they were transferred by bankcard or check within the
digital banking system. The transfer penalty could be phased out over
time as cash deposits were built up. In effect, the money would just be
on loan at interest to the banks for several years.

Another much-discussed alternative would be for Greece to leave the
EU and simply issue drachmas. But as of this writing, it looks as if the
creditors have strong-armed Greek leaders into accepting their harsh austerity measures in order to stay in the EU.

Greece blazed the trail globally for political democracy, but
modeling a sustainable economic democracy may have to wait for another
day.____________Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Greece And The EU Situation

Paul Craig Roberts

I doubt that there will be a Greek exit.

The Greek referendum, in which the Greek government’s position easily
prevailed, tells the troika (EU Commission, European Central Bank, IMF,
with of course Washington as the puppet master) that the Greek people
support their government’s position that the years of austerity to which
Greece has been subjected have seriously worsened the debt problem.
The Greek government has been trying to turn the austerity approach into
reforms that would lessen the debt burden via a rise in employment,
GDP, and tax revenues.

The first response of most EU politicians to the Greek referendum
outcome was to bluster about Greece exiting Europe. Washington is not
prepared for this to happen and has told its vassals to give the Greeks a
deal that they can accept that will keep them within the EU.

Washington has a higher interest than the interests of the US
financial interests who purchased discounted sovereign debt with a view
toward profiting from a deal that pays 100 cents on the dollar.
Washington also has higher interest than the interests of the European
One Percent intent on using Greece’s indebtedness to loot the country of
its national assets. Washington’s higher interest is the protection of
the unity of the EU and, thereby, NATO, Washington’s mechanism for
bringing conflict to Russia.

If the inflexible Germans were to have Greece booted from the EU,
Greece’s turn to Russia and financial rescue would put the same idea in
the heads of Italy and Spain and perhaps ultimately France. NATO would
unravel as Southern Europe became members of Russia’s Eurasian trade
bloc, and American power would unravel with NATO.

This is simply unacceptable to Washington.

If reports are correct, Victoria Nuland has already paid a visit to
the Greek prime minister and explained to him that he is neither to
leave the EU or cozy up to the Russians or there will be consequences,
polite language for overthrow or assassination. Indeed, the Greek prime
minister probably knows this without need of a visit.

I conclude that the “Greek debt crisis” is now contained. The IMF
has already adopted the Greek government’s position with the release of
the IMF report that it was a mistake from the beginning to impose
austerity on Greece. Pressured by this report and by Washington, the EU
Commission and European Central Bank will now work with the Greek
government to come up with a plan acceptable to Greece.

This means that Italy, Spain, and Portugal can also expect more lenient treatment.

The losers are the looters who intended to use austerity measures to
force these countries to transfer national assets into private hands. I
am not implying that they are completely deterred, only that the extent
of the plunder has been reduced.

As I have previously written, the Greek “debt crisis” was an
orchestration from the beginning. The European Central Bank is printing
60 billion euros per month, and at any time during the “crisis” the ECB
could have guaranteed the solvency of any remaining creditor banks by
purchasing their holdings of Greek debt, just as the Federal Reserve
purchased the troubled mortgage backed “securities” held by the “banks
too big to fail.” This easy solution was not taken.

The orchestration was a benefit to Western financial interests in
general by enabling enormous speculations on the euro and gambling with
derivative bets on sovereign debt and everything connected to it. Each
successive “crisis,” such as Sunday’s No vote, became cover for an
attack on oil or other commodities. The rigging and manipulation of
markets can be hidden by pointing fingers at the latest “crisis.”

John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,
describes the process by which Western financial interests
intentionally over-lend to weaker countries and then use the pressure of
the debt to force the transfer of the countries’ wealth, and often
sovereignty, to the West. The IMF and its austerity programs have long
played a role in the looting.

In exchange for reducing euro debt on Greece’s books, Greece was to
turn over to private interests its water companies, ports, and protected
islands. Unless the One Percent can purchase the current Greek
government as it purchased previous governments (for example, with
payoffs to borrow money with which to purchase submarines), the
referendum has frustrated the looters.

In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I
explained that the Greek “debt crisis” had two other purposes. One was
to get rid of the practice of restructuring a country’s debt by writing
it down to a level the country could afford and to establish in its
place the new principle that people of a country are responsible for the
mistakes of creditors who over-lend. The write-down is no longer to
occur on the balance sheet of the creditors’ but instead becomes a
write-down of pensions, social services, and employment. This, too, is a
process of looting.

The other purpose, as Jean-Claude Trichet, the previous head of the
European Central Bank, made explicitly clear, was to further reduce the
sovereignty of member states of the EU by transferring authority over
fiscal policy (tax and spend decisions) from national governments to the
EU in Brussels.

Washington favors this centralization of political power in Europe,
and Washington favors the One Percent over the people. However, above
all Washington favors its own power and has acted to prevent a Greek
exit, which could begin the unraveling of NATO.

Russia and China have missed an opportunity to begin the unraveling
of NATO by assisting Greece’s departure from the EU. Whatever the cost,
it would be tiny in comparison to the military buildup that Washington
is forcing on both countries. Russia and China might have decided that
Washington could no more accept Greece’s alignment with Russia than
Russia can accept Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.

If the Greek situation and the waiting Italian and Spanish situations
are now resolved along the lines that this article suggests, it means
that the NATO mechanism for Washington’s pressure on Russia remains
intact and that the conflict that Washington has created will continue.
This is the bad news and the downside of Greece’s victory over the
looters.

Costas Lapavitsas is a professor in economics at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. He teaches the political economy of finance, and he's a regular columnist for The Guardian.

Europe
dodged a bullet on Sunday. Confounding many predictions, Greek voters
strongly supported their government’s rejection of creditor demands. And
even the most ardent supporters of European union should be breathing a
sigh of relief.

Of
course, that’s not the way the creditors would have you see it. Their
story, echoed by many in the business press, is that the failure of
their attempt to bully Greece into acquiescence was a triumph of
irrationality and irresponsibility over sound technocratic advice.

But
the campaign of bullying — the attempt to terrify Greeks by cutting off
bank financing and threatening general chaos, all with the almost open
goal of pushing the current leftist government out of office — was a
shameful moment in a Europe that claims to believe in democratic
principles. It would have set a terrible precedent if that campaign had
succeeded, even if the creditors were making sense.

What’s
more, they weren’t. The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats
are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and
when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more
bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to
years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact,
given the arithmetic,
can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it
reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide
victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from
this trap.

But how can such an escape be managed? Is there any way for Greece to remain in the euro? And is this desirable in any case?

The
most immediate question involves Greek banks. In advance of the
referendum, the European Central Bank cut off their access to additional
funds, helping to precipitate panic and force the government to impose a
bank holiday and capital controls. The central bank now faces an
awkward choice: if it resumes normal financing it will as much as admit
that the previous freeze was political, but if it doesn’t it will
effectively force Greece into introducing a new currency.

Specifically,
if the money doesn’t start flowing from Frankfurt (the headquarters of
the central bank), Greece will have no choice but to start paying wages
and pensions with i.o.u.s, which will de facto be a parallel currency —
and which might soon turn into the new drachma.

Suppose,
on the other hand, that the central bank does resume normal lending,
and the banking crisis eases. That still leaves the question of how to
restore economic growth.

In
the failed negotiations that led up to Sunday’s referendum, the central
sticking point was Greece’s demand for permanent debt relief, to remove
the cloud hanging over its economy. The troika — the institutions
representing creditor interests — refused, even though we now know that
one member of the troika, the International Monetary Fund, had concluded
independently that Greece’s debt cannot be paid. But will they
reconsider now that the attempt to drive the governing leftist coalition
from office has failed?

I have no idea — and in any case there is now a strong argument that Greek exit from the euro is the best of bad options.

Imagine,
for a moment, that Greece had never adopted the euro, that it had
merely fixed the value of the drachma in terms of euros. What would
basic economic analysis say it should do now? The answer,
overwhelmingly, would be that it should devalue — let the drachma’s
value drop, both to encourage exports and to break out of the cycle of
deflation.

Of course, Greece no longer has its own currency, and many analysts used to claim that adopting the euro was an irreversible move
— after all, any hint of euro exit would set off devastating bank runs
and a financial crisis. But at this point that financial crisis has
already happened, so that the biggest costs of euro exit have been paid.
Why, then, not go for the benefits?

Would Greek exit from the euro work as well as Iceland’s highly successful devaluation in 2008-09, or Argentina’s abandonment
of its one-peso-one-dollar policy in 2001-02? Maybe not — but consider
the alternatives. Unless Greece receives really major debt relief, and
possibly even then, leaving the euro offers the only plausible escape
route from its endless economic nightmare.

And let’s be clear: if Greece ends up leaving the euro, it won’t mean
that the Greeks are bad Europeans. Greece’s debt problem reflected
irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any
case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over.
If they can’t make a go of Europe’s common currency, it’s because that
common currency offers no respite for countries in trouble. The
important thing now is to do whatever it takes to end the bleeding.

Greeks Vote NO To EU-Imposed Austerity

Paul Craig Roberts

With 90% of the votes counted, the Greek people have voted 61% to 39%
against accepting the latest round of austerity that the EU is trying
to impose on the Greek people for the benefit of the One Percent. What
is amazing is that 39% voted for the One Percent against their own
interests. This 39% vote shows that propaganda works to convince people
to vote against their own interest.

The vote was not a vote to leave the EU. With the backing of the
Greek nation, the Greek government hopes to reopen negotiations with the
EU and to find a solution to the debt problem that will actually work.
The EU objects to the Greek people having a voice in their fate, and
unless common sense prevails is inclined to disregard the vote and to
maintain the EU’s inflexible position that the debt issue can be
resolved only on the EU’s terms. As has been made perfectly clear,
these terms are more looting of the Greek economy by the One Percent.

As the Greek banks are closed and evidently cannot reopen without a
resolution of the issue, EU inflexibility would force Greece to leave
the euro and return to its own currency in order to reopen the banks.
This would not require Greece’s departure from the EU as the UK and one
or two other EU member states have their own currencies. However, most
likely the EU and Washington and Washington’s Japanese, Canadian, and
Australian vassals would attack the new Greek currency and drive its
value in exchange markets to such a low value that Greece could not
import and wealth held in Greek currency would be worthless abroad.

An inflexible EU creates conditions for Russia and China to act.
These two powerful nations have the means to finance Greece and to bring
Greece into the economic relationships established by these two
countries and by the BRICS.

Alexander Dugin, a Russian strategic thinker who has the ear of the Russian government, has said:

“The Russians are on the side of the Greeks, we will not leave them
alone in their suffering. We will help them and give them every possible
support. Brussels and the liberal hegemony seek to dismantle Greece. We
want to rescue it. We took our religions faith from Greece, as well as
our alphabet and our civilization.”

Dugin said that the Greek referendum is the start of “the fundamental
European liberalization process from the dictatorship of the New World
Order.” He says this also is “our own endeavor.”

The Greek drama is far from over. Pray that the Russian and Chinese
governments understand that rescuing Greece is the start of the process
of unravelling NATO, Washington’s mechanism for bringing conflict to
Russia and China. The One Percent have Italy and Spain targeted for
looting, and eventually France and Germany herself. If the Greek people
rescue themselves from the clutches of the EU, Italy and Spain could
follow.

As Southern Europe departs NATO, Washington’s ability to create
violence in Ukraine is diminished as the world realigns against the Evil
Empire.

Washington’s power could suddenly diminish, thus saving the world
from the nuclear war toward which Washington’s neoconservatives are
pushing.

“Greece is being ‘hit’, there’s no doubt about it,” exclaims
John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, noting that
“[Indebted countries] become servants to what I call the corporatocracy
… today we have a global empire, and it’s not an American empire. It’s not a national empire… It’s a corporate empire, and the big corporations rule.”

John Perkins is no stranger to making confessions. His well-known book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,
revealed how international organizations such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, while publicly professing to
“save” suffering countries and economies, instead pull a bait-and-switch
on their governments: promising startling growth, gleaming new
infrastructure projects and a future of economic prosperity – all of
which would occur if those countries borrow huge loans from those
organizations. Far from achieving runaway economic growth and success,
however, these countries instead fall victim to a crippling and
unsustainable debt burden.

That’s where the “economic hit men” come in: seemingly
ordinary men, with ordinary backgrounds, who travel to these countries
and impose the harsh austerity policies prescribed by the IMF and World
Bank as “solutions” to the economic hardship they are now experiencing.
Men like Perkins were trained to squeeze every last drop of wealth and
resources from these sputtering economies, and continue to do so to this
day. In this interview, which aired on Dialogos Radio, Perkins talks
about how Greece and the eurozone have become the new victims of such
“economic hit men.”

Michael Nevradakis: In your book, you write about how you
were, for many years, a so-called “economic hit man.” Who are these
economic hit men, and what do they do?

John Perkins: Essentially, my job was to identify
countries that had resources that our corporations want, and that could
be things like oil – or it could be markets – it could be transportation
systems. There’re so many different things. Once we identified these
countries, we arranged huge loans to them, but the money would never
actually go to the countries; instead it would go to our own
corporations to build infrastructure projects in those countries, things
like power plants and highways that benefitted a few wealthy people as
well as our own corporations, but not the majority of people who
couldn’t afford to buy into these things, and yet they were left holding
a huge debt, very much like what Greece has today, a phenomenal debt.

And once [they were] bound by that debt, we would go back, usually in
the form of the IMF – and in the case of Greece today, it’s the IMF and
the EU [European Union] – and make tremendous demands on the country:
increase taxes, cut back on spending, sell public sector utilities to
private companies, things like power companies and water systems,
transportation systems, privatize those, and basically become a slave to
us, to the corporations, to the IMF, in your case to the EU, and
basically, organizations like the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, are tools
of the big corporations, what I call the “corporatocracy.”

And before turning specifically to the case of Greece, let’s
talk a little bit more about the manner in which these economic hit men
and these organizations like the IMF operate. You mentioned, of course,
how they go in and they work to get these countries into massive debt,
that money goes in and then goes straight back out. You also mentioned
in your book these overly optimistic growth forecasts that are sold to
the politicians of these countries but which really have no resemblance
to reality.

Exactly, we’d show that if these investments were made in things like
electric energy systems that the economy would grow at phenomenally
high rates. The fact of the matter is, when you invest in these big
infrastructure projects, you do see economic growth, however, most of
that growth reflects the wealthy getting wealthier and wealthier; it
doesn’t reflect the majority of the people, and we’re seeing that in the
United States today.

For example, where we can show economic growth, growth in the GDP,
but at the same time unemployment may be going up or staying level, and
foreclosures on houses may be going up or staying stable. These numbers
tend to reflect the very wealthy, since they have a huge percentage of
the economy, statistically speaking. Nevertheless, we would show that
when you invest in these infrastructure projects, your economy does
grow, and yet, we would even show it growing much faster than it ever
conceivably would, and that was only used to justify these horrendous,
incredibly debilitating loans.

Is there a common theme with respect to the countries
typically targeted? Are they, for instance, rich in resources or do they
typically possess some other strategic importance to the powers that
be?

Yes, all of those. Resources can take many different forms: One is
the material resources like minerals or oil; another resource is
strategic location; another resource is a big marketplace or cheap
labor. So, different countries make different requirements. I think what
we’re seeing in Europe today isn’t any different, and that includes
Greece.

What happens once these countries that are targeted are
indebted? How do these major powers, these economic hit men, these
international organizations come back and get their “pound of flesh,” if
you will, from the countries that are heavily in debt?

By insisting that the countries adopt policies that will sell their
publicly owned utility companies, water and sewage systems, maybe
schools, transportation systems, even jails, to the big corporations.
Privatize, privatize. Allow us to build military bases on their soil.
Many things can be done, but basically, they become servants to what I
call the corporatocracy. You have to remember that today we have a
global empire, and it’s not an American empire. It’s not a national
empire. It doesn’t help the American people very much. It’s a corporate
empire, and the big corporations rule. They control the politics of the
United States, and to a large degree they control a great deal of the
policies of countries like China, around the world.

John, looking specifically now at the case of Greece, of
course you mentioned your belief that the country has become the victim
of economic hit men and these international organizations . . . what was
your reaction when you first heard about the crisis in Greece and the
measures that were to be implemented in the country?

I’ve been following Greece for a long time. I was on Greek
television. A Greek film company did a documentary called “Apology of an
Economic Hit Man,” and I also spent a lot of time in Iceland and in
Ireland. I was invited to Iceland to help encourage the people there to
vote on a referendum not to repay their debts, and I did that and
encouraged them not to, and they did vote no, and as a result, Iceland
is doing quite well now economically compared to the rest of Europe.
Ireland, on the other hand: I tried to do the same thing there, but the
Irish people apparently voted against the referendum, though there’s
been many reports that there was a lot of corruption.

In the case of Greece, my reaction was that “Greece is being hit.”
There’s no question about it. Sure, Greece made mistakes, your leaders
made some mistakes, but the people didn’t really make the mistakes, and
now the people are being asked to pay for the mistakes made by their
leaders, often in cahoots with the big banks. So, people make tremendous
amounts of money off of these so-called “mistakes,” and now, the people
who didn’t make the mistakes are being asked to pay the price. That’s
consistent around the world: We’ve seen it in Latin America. We’ve seen
it in Asia. We’ve seen it in so many places around the world.

This leads directly to the next question I had: From my
observation, at least in Greece, the crisis has been accompanied by an
increase in self-blame or self-loathing; there’s this sentiment in
Greece that many people have that the country failed, that the people
failed . . . there’s hardly even protest in Greece anymore, and of
course there’s a huge “brain drain” – there’s a lot of people that are
leaving the country. Does this all seem familiar to you when comparing
to other countries in which you’ve had personal experience?

Sure, that’s part of the game: convince people that they’re wrong,
that they’re inferior. The corporatocracy is incredibly good at that,
whether it is back during the Vietnam War, convincing the world that the
North Vietnamese were evil; today it’s the Muslims. It’s a policy of
them versus us: We are good. We are right. We do everything right.
You’re wrong. And in this case, all of this energy has been directed at
the Greek people to say “you’re lazy; you didn’t do the right thing; you
didn’t follow the right policies,” when in actuality, an awful lot of
the blame needs to be laid on the financial community that encouraged
Greece to go down this route. And I would say that we have something
very similar going on in the United States, where people here are being
led to believe that because their house is being foreclosed that they
were stupid, that they bought the wrong houses; they overspent
themselves.

The fact of the matter is their bankers told them to do this, and
around the world, we’ve come to trust bankers – or we used to. In the
United States, we never believed that a banker would tell us to buy a
$500,000 house if in fact we could really only afford a $300,000 house.
We thought it was in the bank’s interest not to foreclose. But that
changed a few years ago, and bankers told people who they knew could
only afford a $300,000 house to buy a $500,000 house.

“Tighten your belt, in a few years that house will be worth a million
dollars; you’ll make a lot of money” . . . in fact, the value of the
house went down; the market dropped out; the banks foreclosed on these
houses, repackaged them, and sold them again. Double whammy. The people
were told, “you were stupid; you were greedy; why did you buy such an
expensive house?” But in actuality, the bankers told them to do this,
and we’ve grown up to believe that we can trust our bankers. Something
very similar on a larger scale happened in so many countries around the
world, including Greece.

In Greece, the traditional major political parties are, of
course, overwhelmingly in favor of the harsh austerity measures that
have been imposed, but also we see that the major business and media
interests are also overwhelmingly in support. Does this surprise you in
the slightest?

No, it doesn’t surprise me and yet it’s ridiculous because austerity
does not work. We’ve proven that time and time again, and perhaps the
greatest proof was the opposite, in the United States during the Great
Depression, when President Roosevelt initiated all these policies to put
people back to work, to pump money into the economy. That’s what works.
We know that austerity does not work in these situations.

We also have to understand that, in the United States for example,
over the past 40 years, the middle class has been on the decline on a
real dollar basis, while the economy has been increasing. In fact,
that’s pretty much happened around the world. Globally, the middle class
has been in decline. Big business needs to recognize – it hasn’t yet,
but it needs to recognize – that that serves nobody’s long-term
interest, that the middle class is the market. And if the middle class
continues to be in decline, whether it’s in Greece or the United States
or globally, ultimately businesses will pay the price; they won’t have
customers. Henry Ford once said: “I want to pay all my workers enough
money so they can go out and buy Ford cars.” That’s a very good policy.
That’s wise. This austerity program moves in the opposite direction and
it’s a foolish policy.

In your book, which was written in 2004, you expressed hope
that the euro would serve as a counterweight to American global
hegemony, to the hegemony of the US dollar. Did you ever expect that we
would see in the European Union what we are seeing today, with austerity
that is not just in Greece but also in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy,
and also several other countries as well?

What I didn’t realize during any of this period was how much
corporatocracy does not want a united Europe. We need to understand
this. They may be happy enough with the euro, with one currency – they
are happy to a certain degree by having it united enough that markets
are open – but they do not want standardized rules and regulations.
Let’s face it, big corporations, the corporatocracy, take advantage of
the fact that some countries in Europe have much more lenient tax laws,
some have much more lenient environmental and social laws, and they can
pit them against each other.

What would it be like for big corporations if they didn’t have their
tax havens in places like Malta or other places? I think we need to
recognize that what the corporatocracy saw at first, the solid euro, a
European union seemed like a very good thing, but as it moved forward,
they could see that what was going to happen was that social and
environmental laws and regulations were going to be standardized. They
didn’t want that, so to a certain degree what’s been going on in Europe
has been because the corporatocracy wants Europe to fail, at least on a
certain level.

You wrote about the examples of Ecuador and other countries,
which after the collapse of oil prices in the late ’80s found themselves
with huge debts and this, of course, led to massive austerity measures .
. . sounds all very similar to what we are now seeing in Greece. How
did the people of Ecuador and other countries that found themselves in
similar situations eventually resist?

Ecuador elected a pretty remarkable president, Rafael Correa, who has
a PhD in economics from a United States university. He understands the
system, and he understood that Ecuador took on these debts back when I
was an economic hit man and the country was ruled by a military junta
that was under the control of the CIA and the US. That junta took on
these huge debts, put Ecuador in deep debt; the people didn’t agree to
that. When Rafael Correa was democratically elected, he immediately
said, “We’re not paying these debts; the people did not take on these
debts; maybe the IMF should pay the debts and maybe the junta, which of
course was long gone – moved to Miami or someplace – should pay the
debts, maybe John Perkins and the other economic hit men should pay the
debts, but the people shouldn’t.”

And since then, he’s been renegotiating and bringing the debts way
down and saying, “We might be willing to pay some of them.” That was a
very smart move; it reflected similar things that had been done at
different times in places like Brazil and Argentina, and more recently,
following that model, Iceland, with great success. I have to say that
Correa has had some real setbacks since then . . . he, like so many
presidents, has to be aware that if you stand up too strongly against
the system, if the economic hit men are not happy, if they don’t get
their way, then the jackals will come in and assassinate you or
overthrow you in a coup. There was an attempted coup against him; there
was a successful coup in a country not too far away from him, Honduras,
because these presidents stood up.

We have to realize that these presidents are in very, very vulnerable
positions, and ultimately we the people have to stand up, because
leaders can only do a certain amount. Today, in many places, leaders are
not just vulnerable; it doesn’t take a bullet to bring down a leader
anymore. A scandal – a sex scandal, a drug scandal – can bring down a
leader. We saw that happen to Bill Clinton, to Strauss-Kahn of the IMF;
we’ve seen it happen a number of times. These leaders are very aware
that they are in very vulnerable positions: If they stand up or go
against the status quo too strongly, they’re going to be taken out, one
way or another. They’re aware of that, and it behooves we the people to
really stand up for our own rights.

You mentioned the recent example of Iceland . . . other than
the referendum that was held, what other measures did the country adopt
to get out of this spiral of austerity and to return to growth and to a
much more positive outlook for the country?

It’s been investing money in programs that put people back to work
and it’s also been putting on trial some of the bankers that caused the
problems, which has been a big uplift in terms of morale for the people.
So Iceland has launched some programs that say “No, we’re not going to
go into austerity; we’re not going to pay back these loans; we’re going
to put the money into putting people back to work,” and ultimately
that’s what drives an economy, people working. If you’ve got high
unemployment, like you do in Greece today, extremely high unemployment,
the country’s always going to be in trouble. You’ve got to bring down
that unemployment, you’ve got to hire people. It’s so important to put
people back to work. Your unemployment is about 28 percent; it’s
staggering, and disposable income has dropped 40 percent and it’s going
to continue to drop if you have high unemployment. So, the important
thing for an economy is to get the employment up and get disposable
income back up, so that people will invest in their country and in goods
and services.

In closing, what message would you like to share with the
people of Greece, as they continue to experience and to live through the
very harsh results of the austerity policies that have been implemented
in the country for the past three years?

I want to draw upon Greece’s history. You’re a proud, strong country,
a country of warriors. The mythology of the warrior to some degree
comes out of Greece, and so does democracy! And to realize that the
marketplace is a democracy today, and how we spend our money is casting
our ballot. Most political democracies are corrupt, including that of
the United States. Democracy is not really working on a governmental
basis because the corporations are in charge. But it is working on a
market basis. I would encourage the people of Greece to stand up: Don’t
pay off those debts; have your own referendums; refuse to pay them off;
go to the streets and strike.

And so, I would encourage the Greek people to continue to do this.
Don’t accept this criticism that it’s your fault, you’re to blame,
you’ve got to suffer austerity, austerity, austerity. That only works
for the rich people; it does not work for the average person or the
middle class. Build up that middle class; bring employment back; bring
disposable income back to the average citizen of Greece. Fight for that;
make it happen; stand up for your rights; respect your history as
fighters and leaders in democracy, and show the world!

About Me

B.S. in Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1960 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966. Fellow, American Physical
Society. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fellow, American Ceramic Society. Member, Geological Society of America, Research Physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC,
1967-2001. Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1997. Invited Professor of Research at Universités
de Paris-6 & 7, Lyon-1, et St-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute
of Technology, 2000-2004. Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering, University of Arizona, 2004-2005. Consultancy: impactGlass
research international, 2005-present.
Winner, one national and two international research awards and honored
by Brown University with a "Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus
Award." Author, 198 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books, Principal Author of 114 of these.